Current Research Projects

Astrophysics Facilities

The Numerical Astrophysics Facility emphasizes theoretical and numerical studies of stars, star clusters, the early universe, galaxy distributions, cosmology modeling, and gravitational lensing. The facility employs special purpose high-performance computers, such as the Gravity Pipeline Engine (GRAPE), a new Beowulf cluster (128 processors, 128G RAM, 2 TB RAID disk), and a system using Graphics Processing Units to achieve computational speeds of up to a trillion floating point operations per second.

Drexel faculty and students actively analyze data from the Sloan Digital Survey, which operates a 2.5-m telescope at Apache Point, New Mexico, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to be built in Chile (2020).